I am seeing a lot of images on Instagram of women being honest about their bodies. People being super brave and publishing pictures of the reality of a post baby body, showing off the pouches and stretchmarks. I admire the braveness of these wonderful women and their positive mental attitude but absolutely cannot share a picture like this of me and the same attitude towards my own body. At the moment, I hate my body.
Regular readers of my blog will know about my constant battles with food, weight gain and weight loss. A few years back I lost a great deal of weight using hypnotherapy and advice from a nutritionist. And I am not going to lie, it’s a constant process to maintain that weight.
The first half of 2018 was great
2018 was a great year for my body and fitness but then I lost the plot. By May/June time my weight was perfect. My fitness was at its best level probably ever in my life. I had no fat overspills on my back or tummy. Shopping for clothes was easy, fitting into a nice size 12 sometimes size 10. I felt comfortable, I ran a 5km run in the best time ever, under 30 minutes.
It was going on holiday that impacted on my healthy living. We went to France to Center Parcs, it was not relaxing in any way. It was also a self-catering holiday involving lots of bread, cheese, meats and gin. There was a lot of gin. I sort of gave up after that holiday and went back to old eating habits. I would gorge on biscuits, ten at a time. We would make cookies and I would eat 12 in a day. I was in a huge repetitive process of binging again and again. We started eating more takeaways, hurting our budgets as well as weight. I wasn’t eating enough fruit and vegetables or drinking enough water.
Self-destruction
This path of self-destruction carried on until Christmas for five whole months, I just couldn’t break out of it. The exercise that I had always been doing carried on, but exercise really isn’t going to make much difference if you are eating rubbish.
The result is a version of myself that I hate to look at. My stomach has gained the most weight, my pouch has returned and fat spills over the top of my jeans (I am still just about sausaged into my old jeans). I have gained a huge amount of fat on my legs, particularly on my inner thighs which rub together. My boobs that had shrunk down to a nice 30 E have gone back up to a 34 F, luckily, I kept my old bras. And my back fat has returned. Ouch that was an ultra-critical look at my overweight body.
This was the picture that made me want to stop with the destruction, the double chin…on TV. This behaviour had to stop. There are no full body pictures of me on Instagram currently.
I have no idea how much weight I have put on and to be honest I am too scared to face the scales. Last time I weighed myself was around September time and by then I was already 10 lbs more than my ideal weight. I have no idea how much more has gone on since then including Christmas.
New Year New Mindset
But this new year I intend to make a change, in fact I started before 2018 had finished. I have a refreshed mindset and am feeling determined to get back to the shape and fitness levels I had reached during 2018.
I am drinking a lot of water every day, this has had an immediate detoxifying effect. The levels of caffeine consumption have reduced. I have hugely upped my vegetables intake and reduced my meat consumption, having many vegetarian or pescatarian days instead.
I am drinking a cup of hot lemon every morning mixing in some mornings with a splash of apple cider vinegar. The gin hasn’t been touched since New Years Eve and I am hugely cutting back on sugar, the devil. Same goes for gluten that I am successfully avoiding most days.
Home cooking is back on the agenda and I have made soup, vegetable noodles, chicken with vegetables and chilli salmon. The diet is good.
The exercise routine never really stopped until December (where I gave up on everything), but that is properly back on track, with three good sessions of exercise each week, including personal training, a 4-5-mile run and HIIT followed by yoga. Plus, lots of walking to and from school.
The thing is once you get going with a healthy lifestyle and exercise it makes you feel good and you want to do it more and more. I am feeling positive and good about the changes I have made and am looking forward to getting my healthier me back again.
2 Responses
Thank you for sharing. Today, overweight is recognized as a psychosomatic disorder based on eating disorders. Any psychosomatic illness, including overweight, can be based on an unresolved inner conflict. It is not understood or not solved, i.e. disappears from the sphere of conscious perception of the person, but keeps its presence in the unconscious. Therefore, one of the first steps on the path to getting rid of food addiction and of excess weight will be to find out the reasons that make people gain it, and weight loss doctor in Houston can help with this.
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